Immortality and apeirophobia

Image: The Makropulos Case (opera)

Philosophers who say: “after death a timeless state will begin”, or: “at death a timeless state begins”, and do not notice that they have used the words “after” and “at” and “begins” in a temporal sense, and that temporality is embedded in their grammar.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 22e (1932, Winch trans, 1980).

Apart from whether it will ever be possible to live forever or even indefinitely – some people think it is or will be – would it be desirable? If so, why? If not, why not? In what sense, does desire have to be fleeting in order to be desirable? In fact, is “fleeting” built into the very idea of “desire”? Suppose you give people what they want, how long does their contentment last? How long can it last?
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The play by Karel Čapek, The Makropoulos Affair, published in 1922, was made into an opera by Leoš Janáček, shortly thereafter, and has just recently been revived by the Royal Ballet and Opera (2025). Back in the 1970s, it sparked a seminal paper on the subject of immortality by the British philosopher Bernard Williams that continues to stir controversy. Immortality is, of course, an ancient idea, largely connected with various religious belief systems, though there are secular “high-tech” versions such as “foreverism” that have emerged from philosophies of mind such as functionalism combined with ethical theories such as consequentialism. The notion is usually posited as a fact, or real possibility, or article of faith by some, or as nonsense by others. Most of the talk around the idea has been about its actuality or possibility. These are metaphysical concerns and not directly our subject for this occasion. Less often has anyone considered what living forever would mean. That’s where Čapek’s play and Williams’ article come in.

Exploring the semantics of immortality will eventually run up against a major puzzle in contemporary ethical theory known as the Non-Identity Problem which has more immediate and practical implications for areas such as medical and environmental ethics.

The Makropoulus Affair
Born in 1585, at the time the play takes place in 1924, Elina Makropoulos is 339 years old but appears to others like she is 30. In her youth, her father came upon an “elixir of life” which freezes physical age for 300 years – after which, you must take it again... if you still want to. Her father, court physician to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, first offered the elixir to the Emperor who, suspecting it might poison him, entreated the physician to try it out on his own daughter, Elina, which he did. The thing is: to learn if it works you may have to wait a lifetime. The Emperor, like everyone else, ages and dies, waiting. Meanwhile, Elina goes on… and on... to become (and remain) a strikingly beautiful woman, a phenomenally talented opera singer, wealthy, a much-loved and admired “rock star” of her time(s). By 1922, she has literally “seen and done it all” several times over – career, family, lovers, children...

But she has had to adopt a strategy to hide from others her secret. No one believes her explanation when people around her begin to notice she does not age. She must vanish from the scene and reappear in some other country with a different identity, speaking another language, essentially starting over but with the benefit (or curse) of undying hindsight. The appeal of living forever is starting to wear thin. But, like most of us, she is afraid to die. Unlike us, she is saddled with a choice...

Elina Makropoulos (her Greek birth name) is compelled to take on several names and identities in succession in order to tolerate living for more than three centuries including:

• Elsa Muller (as German)
• Ellian MacGregor (as Scottish)
• Ekaterina Myskin (as Russian)
• Eugenie Montez (as Spanish)
• Emilia Marty (as Czech)

At the time of the play, she is Emilia.
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The full writeup will delve into what Bernard Williams and others make of Elina’s plight...

The Makropulos case against living forever:

• “Philosophy and Death | Bernard Williams,” Dave Egan Philosophy (video).
• “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,” Bernard Williams, from Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• “Bernard Williams | The Makropulos Case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,” Victor Gijsbers (video).
• The Makropulos Affair, (1922) full text of the play by Karel Čapek; audio recording of the opera based on the play by Leoš Janáček; both at the Internet Archive.
• “Insights: The Makropulos Case,” discussion of the 2025 Royal Ballet and Opera production.

The case for:

• “We Should Want Immortality | John Martin Fischer,” Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff, Brain in a Vat, (video).
• “The frightening infinite spaces: apeirophobia,” Anders Sandberg, Andart II, 2017.
• “Staying alive,” Sophie Grace, The Open University.
• “A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next, biologist George Church says the idea is to live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old,” MIT Review, Antonio Regalado, 2018.

More resources:

• “Philosophy 2465 Survey | Death and the Meaning of Life,” what people say about living forever, OSU.
• “The Prescience of Karel Čapek,” lecture by Thomas Ort at CUNY, 2025. Ort reviews Čapek’s work in the historical context of the 1920-1930s and considers him more an important satirist of human pretension and less a science fiction writer, as he is still often recalled. Though rooted in the political conditions of his time, his themes run much deeper than any time or place. The themes prefigure modern technologies such as AI, genetic engineering, viruses and vaccines, or – as in The Makropulos Case, flesh out provocative “what-if” thought experiments exposing human confusion about what we really want.
• “The Strangest Idea in Science: Quantum Immortality,” Cool Worlds’ David Kipping astronomer and astrostatistician, explains how a kind of immortality may be a consequence of quantum mechanics. The metaphysics of the possibility and actuality of immortality isn’t strictly relevant to our topic – which is the desirability of the possibility, not its actuality – but, if one of the premier theories of the physical world is correct, we may not have a choice. There is a sense of “we” in which “we” are condemned to live forever because the concatenation of the logical possibility and the “many worlds theory” (falling out of quantum mechanics) entails it – desirably or not. It’s not an either/or. We will die also: both live forever and die an infinite number of times over. Both... At every point of your life when it was possible for you to die, you do die, and at every point when you could have survived, you do survive… But we may still ask whether the “we” or “you” in use here meaningfully references the subjects of life we recognize as ours? And, if these pronouns do reference something identifiable, it raises the question would a forced immortality be desirable to whom (or what) you (or we) take yourself (or ourselves) to be now? And this brings us back to the Makropulos problem.

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